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Posts Tagged ‘Ravi Subramanian’

It’s Friday afternoon and spring is busting out all over, so why would anyone want to sit on a conference call and talk about EDA? Well, if you were Ravi Subramanian, President and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation, you would. The company he leads has just been sold to Mentor Graphics and today’s his day to celebrate the feat with the press.

I spoke with Ravi for 20 minutes this afternoon and remembered straightaway why he is the real thing. Well spoken, fully informed, and completely disciplined in his presentation, still his extreme delight with the acquisition was in full view as he patiently fielded my questions.

Given that history and innovation are being featured here in this space this week, it’s only appropriate to highlight the fact that EDAC is hosting a very interesting event related to history and innovation in Silicon Valley next week.

On Wednesday, October 16th, those who have made massive contributions to the EDA industry will be highlighted and celebrated at a black-tie optional dinner at the Computer History Museum. If you’re interested in rubbing elbows with the powerful and prolific, you should be going to this event. If you want a chance to bid at auction for lunch with today’s corporate leaders in EDA, you should be going to this event. If you think said corporate leaders make enough money to pay for your lunch, rather than vice versa, you should still be going to this event.

BDA chief operating office Paul Estrada has been at Berkeley Design Automation for over 7 years and is as enthused about the company today as when he first arrived. Particularly, because he says BDA is getting more attention than ever these days thanks to its growing portfolio of leading-edge products.

“We are a small business that continues to grow,” Estrada says with pride, “focusing on nanometer verification, a market where there are lots of problems, but where we are definitely making [inroads]. It’s an area that’s ripe for innovation, and better tooling, and as we don’t see the big EDA companies putting time or effort into making progress there, it’s a sweet spot in the market for us.”

Sounds great, so what’s the elevator pitch for potential customers?

Estrada responds easily: “Many companies continue to buy from our competition – principally Cadence and Synopsys – but we go into leading edge RF and analog/mixed-signal design teams and ask them what they can’t do with their current tools. They tell us and then we do those things for them with our tools. As a result, they buy even more tools from us and we go on from there.

There are three things to remember about Jim Hogan: He’s an affable guy, he’s usually sporting a Hawaiian shirt, and he’s extremely accessible; when you interview him, he’s able to talk to you without a PR person sitting at his elbow. I spoke with Jim by phone in late July.

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WWJD: How are you doing, and what’s up with this upcoming surfing-themed fundraiser you’re hosting?

Jim Hogan: I’d doing great, and yeah – that’s an annual fund raiser we host. I live in Santa Cruz, where life is pretty easy and my kids surf.

Also I work a lot with Jill Jacobs [Mod Marketing], who’s got relatives here in Santa Cruz. Jill was my coordinator for roadshows at Cadence and still does logistics for some of my startups. Her relatives are just a great family and are neighbors with Jack O’Neal [surfing entrepreneur and credited by many for inventing the wetsuit] who’s always donating to charities here.

Santa Cruz isn’t too far from the Valley, and I always have a lot of fun when we put these two crowds together, the surfers and the technology folks. For me, it’s kind of like the parties we had at my frat in college. You pick the day, buy the beer, and invite a bunch of people. [laughing] Maybe we’ve scaled up a little bit since then. Now my frat parties have a somewhat corporate feel.

It’s stranger than fiction, but there are actually two different entities at DAC that bear the name BDA, and they’re both acronyms.

One is a company very familiar to the EDA space, Berkeley Design Automation. As you know, President & CEO Ravi Subramanian has just been elected to a second term as a member of the Board of Directors of EDAC.

Subramanian’s BDA is in the news again this week because they just announced that ATopTech, also an EDA company, is now using BDA’s Analog FastSpice to “enhance the accuracy of the timing analysis in [ATopTech’s] Aprisa P&R product for designs at advanced process technology nodes such as 28nm and 20nm..”

So what is the otherBDA at DAC? It’s Biological Design Automation. The International Workshop on Biological Design Automation figured large on Sunday and Monday, June 3rd and 4th, in San Francisco where it was again co-located with the Design Automation Conference, as it has been for several years.

Stop the presses! Someone other than the CEO of Mentor, Synopsys, or Cadence is going to be the Chair of EDAC.

What? Has the world come to an end?

Nope, but it turns out that even staid EDAC has, at last, learned how to innovate. It turns out that Mentor, Synopsys, and Cadence have, at least, seen the light and decided that they shouldn’t always be at the head of the class. As of yesterday, May 31st, there’s a new Chair at EDAC and it’s Kathryn Kranen, President & CEO at Jasper Design Automation.

Kathryn, of course, is well known within the EDA community. She’s been CEO at Jasper since 2003. Prior to Jasper, Kathryn was CEO of Verisity Design, and earlier on served as VP of North American sales at Quickturn. At the outset of her career, after earning a BSEE at Texas A&M, she worked as a design engineer at Rockwell, and then joined Daisy Systems in advance of her role at Quickturn.

In addition, Kathryn was named the 2005 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Woman in EDA Achievement Award, and has been an extremely hard working member of the Board of Directors of EDAC for many years.

If you’re interested in start-ups, if you think you’ve got what it takes to plunge in and do the deed, the EDA Consortium has something you’re going to want to attend.

Starting on May 31st – that’s in about 5 weeks – EDAC will be offering a series of evening discussions about various “concepts and best practices for emerging companies.”

The series is going to be hosted by long-time EDA player, Jim Hogan. And as you all know, what Jim Hogan doesn’t know about EDA, start-ups, venture capital, and everything in between, simply isn’t worth knowing – so you’re sure to be in the best of hands with Jim moderating these meetings.

Of course, you don’t just have to be a new, up-and-coming entrepreneur to plan to benefit from the series, because EDAC says: “the content is geared to founders and executives of software, systems, and semiconductor companies, as well as others interested in getting a birds-eye view of what companies face at the various stages of success.”